RETRO ACTIVE: The Antichrist (1974)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the demonic-possession horror film The Devil Inside, this week it's Alberto De Martino's 1974 Italian Exorcist rip-off The Antichrist. Part of the wave of cheap copycats that flooded international cinemas in the wake of
William Friedkin's 1973 classic
The Exorcist,
Alberto De Martino's
The Antichrist (a/k/a
L'anticristo, though released domestically in 1974 under the lamer moniker
The Tempter) makes no bones about its plagiaristic inclinations. Yet before it can get to its eventual derivative mayhem, this overheated Italian B-movie first feels compelled to spend an inordinate amount of time spinning its supernatural wheels. Paralyzed from the waist down by a childhood car accident that took her mother and was caused by her father not properly watching the road (look out for that dog!), Ippolita (
Carla Gravina) goes to visit a Virgin Mary statue where the masses seek healing?a site where one crazy bugger goes insane and, fleeing outside into the rain, deliberately plummets to his death in one of director De Martino's many amusingly goofy rear-projection effects shots. Back at home, Ippolita expresses fury at her father Massimo (
Mel Ferrer) for planning to marry Greta (
Anita Strindberg), less because Greta will replace her mother than because Ippolita herself seems to have a not-so-subtle oedipal longing for dear old daddy. Aside from being angry, Ippolita doesn't believe in God, a problem that greatly concerns her uncle Bishop Ascanio (
Arthur Kennedy), given that apparently "sexed-up devil worshipers are springing up everywhere" to prey on non-believers.
Enter psychologist Dr. Sinibaldi (
Umberto Orsini), whose rationalism is supposed to counteract Ippolita's irrationality (and cursorily referenced psychic powers). Dr. Sinibaldi suggests an aggressive form of "regressive hypnosis" that forces Ippolita to confront not only her mother's death?in a scene of wild screaming on a black leather couch drenched in light from a chandelier of glowing bulbs?but also her past life as a witch condemned to die at the stake during the Inquisition. That long-ago death sentence takes place in a strikingly designed circular brick room where the witch (also Gravina, in a blonde wig) is ensnared in a round cage while sneering monks in white robes decry her unholiness. Ippolita's experience of this ancient pseudo-memory proves the beginning of her own nightmare, as it opens a gateway between herself and her ancestor that climaxes in
The Antichrist's most memorable sequence. As the walls above and around her change into blue, and then red, sky, a bedridden Ippolita is overcome by a vision in which the witch (through whom Ippolita experiences everything) is walked through a misty grey forest where a satanic orgy is taking place to a concrete slab where a man in a goat mask forces her to take Beelzebub's communion: the head of a toad (the body), the blood of a toad (the blood), and then some good ol' fashioned ritualistic sex to finish the whole thing off.
Decapitated toads are the principal sign of the devil in
The Antichrist, though like much of the action's religious mumbo-jumbo, there's no rhyme or reason why. Still, that randomness is part of this central motif's moderate effectiveness, and it's far preferable to the blather that takes up much of the film's middle section, in which Ippolita
very slowly comes under the control of a malevolent invading spirit while her father frets, her brother Filippo (
Remo Girone) looks confused about his role in all of this, Dr. Sinibaldi proposes laughable scientific theories and uncle Ascanio delivers standard gibberish about the irrefutable existence of Satan. Even the recurring strident-strings theme music for Ippolita's possession?courtesy of the legendary
Ennio Morricone, working with
Bruno Nicolai?can't muster up energy during these segments, and despite Gravina making a reasonably freaky center of attention, her Ippolita does little of interest. Mercifully, that changes once the Lord of the Underworld grants her the use of her legs, but even so, there's a persistent sense during even the more outrageous ensuing incidents?Ippolita seduces and then beheads a young stud, then convinces sibling Filippo to have some incestuous sex?that De Martino is content to merely rest on straightforward
Exorcist-isms.
Thus, green pea-soup vomit proves plentiful?including a sublime bit featuring Ippolita forcing a local magic-man to eat it out of her palm ("Lick it. LIIIIIIIICK IT!")?and levitation becomes a recurring parlor trick, all as Gravina foams at the mouth, her face pale and her short hair turned spikey in a way that makes her resemble a less composed Annie Lennox. Between the arrival of an old, balding exorcist monk (
George Coulouris) who plays like a third-rate
Max von Sydow, and Ippolita's ridiculous sexualized taunts (after telling her dad about screwing Filippo, she screams, "You like the idea, you shithead!"),
The Antichrist ultimately lays bare its lack of originality, a fact that can't be masked even by the sensationalistic sight of Ippolita flashing her naked crotch to uncle Ascanio. When it comes to the film's general creative bankruptcy, however, nothing quite tops De Martino's amazingly misguided belief that the scariest thing about demonic possession is the netherworld creature's unflagging ability to make common household and bedroom furniture shakily levitate.
Posted by ahillis at January 6, 2012 11:14 AM
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